Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Staunton,
July 12 –Aleksandr Sytin was recently on a Moscow television show hosted by
Vladimir Solovyev about the values Vladimir Putin’s Russian world seeks to
offer other peoples. Solovyev did not given the Russian historian the chance to
present his ideas, and so Sytin has posted online 12 such Russian (facebook.com/alexander.sytin/posts/1417088478369526).

Sytin’s dozen clearly show why Putin’s
Russian world project is unlikely to be successful beyond the borders of his
country. Indeed, most of the values the historian points so are so off-putting
that it is no surprise that an employee of a Russian government TV station
would be all too ready to cut him off.

The 12 values Sytin identifies
include:

1.“The
chief value for Russians is territory, its size.” This is “absolutely irrational”
because “the larger part of it is unsuitable for life” and is left unused.

2.“For
Russians, the state plays a sacred role,” defining the position of all of them
in relation to itself and creating in them “a pathological feature of being
without the paternalistic concern of the state” or of taking responsibility for
themselves.

3.“Russians
are incapable of self-organization without an external stimulus and organizing force.
The exceptions concern chiefly military activity – the peasant revolts, Minin,
Yermak, and the Cossacks.”

4.“Russians
have not mastered the culture of work.” They view it as “God’s curse” and will
use “any pretext to minimize their efforts.”

5.“They
are extremely arrogant toward other nations especially those less numerous or
smaller in territory than their own.” Without knowledge, they are proud of
their own history and ignorant about the history of almost everyone else.

6.“Unlike
their close Western Slavic neighbors, the Poles, the Ukrainians, and
Belarusians, the Russians do not value education highly.”

7.“They
arrogantly treat those who are physically weaker than they are. They are
absolutely without pity to those with physical handicaps or infectious
illnesses” and they are cruel to “women, children and animals.”

8.No
one should trust anything a Russian says.

9.Russian
society cannot be called anything other than bestial, with drunkenness, force,
pedophilia, hostility to old people “even their own relatives” all being the norm
and reflecting “the very lowest level of human morality.”

10.“Russians
fear and do not accept any changes.” Stability and “certainty about tomorrow”
are for them central and defining values.

11.“Russians
lack the ability to live, to show what the French call ‘savoir vivre.’” They
may acquire money but they will never display a serious aesthetic. “Look at
their cities! Only St. Petersburg can pretend to the rank of city, and that
with qualifications. All the rest are faceless agglomerations.”

12.Russians
are given to nostalgia, something that saps their will and the ability to “take
decisions. Only in Russian literature is there a tradition of the phenomenon of
‘superfluous men,’ people who above all else haven’t found their place in
government activity.”

Any non-Russian who would say any of these
things would be denounced immediately as a Russophobe. For a Russian to say all
of them is damning indeed.